Google+ hangouts reflection

I have now been a part of two Google+ hangouts I must say I am loving them! The atmosphere is so different and definitely a great way to connect with others which of course is the general idea of hangouts. It really has the feel of sitting in a circle and chatting with people, all on an equal seating. This of course could be the weakness of hangouts, however we have had very little trouble with this form of communication - though the idea of raising hands has come up a couple of times :)

The only real issue that we have found so far is trying to play YouTube videos as you can see from the picture above. The video doesn't seem to run at the same time for everybody and causes some issues especially for those who couldn't even see it. Hopefully this feature gets better as it is one of the features I think would be very useful if we find any good YouTube videos to share.

I am not sure that I would use it with students though maybe it would work well as a tutorial session similar to what I experience at university and throughly enjoyed (at least more than the lectures).

I was also happy to find an effective way to record the session using Screencast-o-matic. I ended up buying a pro account for $12 a year (really, that is all) which allows me to record for over an hour instead of 15 minutes segments. To upload to the Screencast-o-matic servers though it must only be 15 minutes in length so I decided to use Vimeo to host the videos and then embed them into the MOOC. This seems to work well so I will continue to do it this way for the Google+ hangouts. You can see the result for the second hangout here.

A big thank you to those who have joined in on the Google+ hangout experiments and have explored the possibilities of this new tool and added to some really insightful conversations.